Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

The World Needs Divine Savior

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The World Needs Divine Savior

Unfortunately, we live in a world of growing injustice, oppression, ruthlessness, humanitarian crisis and disorders! Power and dangerous weapons are in the hand of some greedy and wolves-likely human that the more they eat the greedier they become. Day to day, the poor people are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. The wealth is gained at cost of shedding blood of innocent children, women and men. One day, if a crazy man access to nuclear weapons, he will destroy the whole world in a minute with a button and then no nation may survive. One day, if poor people wake up and knew how rich people are, there would be riots in the global streets. Likewise, if the climate change keeps changing, human should wait for a more unhealthy, unsafe, and unsustainable future.
Socially and economically, we have created great disparities of wealth. According to studies, a minority of the world's population (17%) consume most of the world's resources (80%), leaving almost 5 billion people to live on the remaining 20%. As a result, billions of people are living without the very basic necessities of life - food, water, housing and sanitation. Specifically, 1.2 billion (20%) of the world population now lives on less that $1/day, another 1.8 billion (30%) lives on less than $2/day, 800 million go to bed hungry every day, and 30,000 - 60,000 die each day from hunger alone. The story is the same when it comes to other necessities like water, housing, education etc. On the flip side, according to Forbes Magazine, we have an increasing accumulation of wealth and power, where that the world hosted 1,810 billionaires, over double the 793 billionaires Forbes counted in 2009, at the depth of the Great Recession. These 1,810 billionaires together hold $6.5 trillion in wealth. The combined income of 582 million people living in the 43 least developed countries is $146 billion. Over all the developing countries, which constitute 70% of the world's population, account for only 30% of the world's income.
People are subjected to extreme poverty, violence, health and lack of education. Over a quarter of Afghan children die before their fifth birthday mostly from preventable diseases such as pneumonia and diarrhea. Afghanistan has some of the worst child malnourishment, stunting, underweight and vitamin deficiency figures in the world. According to the World Food Program, 39% of children under the age of five are underweight. 78% of Afghan children lack access to safe water and 1 in 8 Afghan women die in child birth. People in Afghanistan are using opium to block pain; the pain of hunger, sickness, physical and mental trauma. Nearly three million addicts in this nation of about 30 million people, including 60,000 children under age 15, and about 13 percent are women and 7 percent are children. Most of the women are opium addicts desperate to blunt the trauma of endless war. Many are illiterate mothers with unemployed husbands. Most have a little in the way of job skills, and some became addicts while picking opium poppies to earn a living and support their families…these have been happening for years while the world is watching and playing childish policies!
The very basic question is how is it wise to expect an even and balanced development of the international community under the existing international economic order? The gap between the industrialized and the developing countries continues to widen in a system which perpetuates inequality crisis. The present international economic order is in direct conflict with current developments in international political and economic relations. Since 1970, the world economy has experienced a series of grave crises, which have had severe repercussions, especially on the developing countries, because of their generally greater vulnerability to external economic impulses.
The decolonization process of the 1960s enabled developing countries (the South) to recognize a common interest contrasted with that of the industrialized countries (the North). In the 1990s this North-South gap has changed profoundly in nature. The relative homogeneity of the South has been transformed into five "South": the newly industrialized countries of Southeast Asia; the oil rich South; the newly impoverished former socialist countries; the countries trying to adjust their economic and development policies in order to accelerate their integration into the North; and the very poor countries, notably in Africa. These changes have increased the social and economic inequalities in all countries and regions of the world. Significantly there has been the emergence of old and new forms of poverty within the North and the development of new wealth within impoverished countries of the South.
Finally, these terrible facts and figures show that the current social and economic system is unable to organize the world. The leaders of current system either are indifferent or enjoy when watching some people are dying due to war and starvation while others are dying because of eating more. In fact, the loss of consensus and the actual breakdown of some systems of global economic management have left the world economy in precarious circumstances. Nearly 80% world populations are suffering from intolerable poverty and economic instabilities. All these are not because the world is incapable of producing enough for its growing population or has run out of raw materials, but simply because countries have not been able to agree on a fair system of managing the world's economy. To end with, it seems that no one could break the current deadlock unless a divine savior.

Mohammad Zahir Akbari is the newly emerging writer of the Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at mohammadzahirakbari@gmail.com

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